Helen Thomas of the MSM tells Jews to “go back to Germany.”

Instead, maybe we could tell Helen Thomas where she can go.  I’d even help her pack.

by Michael Naragon

RabbiLIVE.com did a quick interview with Thomas, who works for Hearst Newspapers, last week.  Her comments toward Israel were illuminating.

Perhaps Ms. Thomas has no grasp of history before 1948.  Or, perhaps, her anti-Semitism blinds her to it.  Has our national position changed so much toward Israel that we are willing to allow such idiocy to spew from our White House press corps?

Someone should give Ms. Thomas, who obviously lived during the period of World War II, a short primer on what happened to the Jews during those years.  If she would be so inclined, I could give her all the details of Hebrew/Jewish occupation of those lands from Abraham’s original entry through the Exodus.  Then we could discuss the establishment of the Jewish monarchy through the Davidic line and the Philistine occupation of the area of Gaza.  Incidentally, the Philistines were Phoenicians, not Islamic Arabs.

She may be interested to hear that the Jews were taken from their home by Assyrians in 722 B.C and the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.  They later returned to their homeland to find the remnant of Jews surrounded by hostile peoples against whom they were forced to defend themselves, leading to the reconstruction of the wall of Jerusalem.  Alexander occupied Palestine as he marched through the region in 332 B.C.  The Romans conquered Jerusalem in 63 B.C., eventually destroying the Temple in A.D. 70.

The result of the Jewish War with Rome and subsequent Roman rule was a dispersal of the Jewish people throughout the Empire, although many Jews remained in Palestine.  Through the years following the fall of the Western Roman Empire (after A.D. 476), a large percentage of the population of the Holy Land was Jewish.  This held through during the years of the Crusades, the rise of the Ottoman Turks, and the eventual rise of the European influence in the Middle East.  Through the 1800s, a majority of people living in Jerusalem were Jews.

When, in 1948, the Jews were returned to their homeland following the Holocaust, it wasn’t the one-sided affair that modern pro-Palestinian pundits would paint it to be.  In fact, many Jews in the Arab and Islamic lands surrounding Palestine were forced out of their countries of residence when their citizenship was revoked and they faced persecution in the form of pogroms.  From the time Israel declared independence in 1948 until the 1970s, it’s estimated that nearly 1 million Jews left or were forced out of their homes in Arab countries.  These Jews were forced to leave 100,000 square kilometers of real estate (roughly four times the size of the current Israeli state) and over $300 billion worth of assets.

Ms. Thomas suggests that the Jews of today return to Germany and Poland.  For many of the Jews who lived in Germany and Poland in the 1930s, when Helen Thomas was undoubtedly reaching the prime of her life, there was no return.  Neither was their any leaving, as 6 million were exterminated by the Hitler regime.  More were executed by the Soviet machine under Stalin.  Instead, Ms. Thomas may like to take a one-way trip to a place where the people share her ideas and her myopic view of history.  Iran, perhaps?